At the beginning of the project, the Coloradoan’s goal was to work on how their audience felt when it came to engaging with the paper as a news source. In addition, they wanted to work on genuinely connecting with their audience.

Project Leads:

Alexandra Smith, Content Strategist. Smith is in charge of leading editorial events and data strategy to grow an engaged audience. She also leads the engagement team at the Coloradoan. Smith has been a part of the paper for two years. You can connect with her via LinkedIn and Twitter.

Rebecca Powell, Engagement Editor. Powell leads social media strategy and content marketing. She is also in charge of managing the editorial board and opinion content. In addition, Powell leads the photography team.You can connect with her via Twitter.

Hear from Smith about her newsroom’s experience:

The Coloradoan had great success with communicating a core value with content. Their audience responded way more to a core value being shared along with content than those that stood alone. Overall, engagement rates seemed to be higher for this particular strategy, with two of the example posts ranking in the top 100 posts during the experiment. Link clicks were mostly over 100 with lots of reactions. This post talked about news that reporters do not enjoy sharing. It generated way above average comments, likes and shares. There were an amazing 3,584 link clicks on the story. Another post discussed the core value of setting the record straight and answering readers’ questions.

None of the strategies the Coloradoan tried were particularly unsuccessful.